Letter XV

Hello, Edvard.

You are a great artist, and I should be writing to you about beauty and delicacy and tenderness, telling you how grateful I am to you and your fellow travelers for producing so much culture and so much good thought in the world.

But this time, what I am writing to you is part grief and confession, part report, part story, part despair, and a small, small piece of hope.

It started with your painting, The Scream. Well, no. Actually, I think it ends there.

I know the painting is less about a scream and more about anxiety, about the shock of being struck dumb. And that, as it happens, is my story right now. Not exactly, but near enough: that same anxiety, with all the silence that always, always comes with this wretched thing.

Edvard, I should also tell you: I no longer know how to scream. Either I have forgotten, or I am not able. It has been years since I could. Even when I push myself to the edge of bruising, no sound comes. I know how to throw my voice to the back of my throat and shout and roar and bellow, but that is not screaming. The sound is not a scream. The shape of it is not either.

Because a scream has a sharpness to it, a terror, that a roar does not. After a scream, everyone goes quiet. After a roar, there is commotion and noise and people rushing around.

The story belongs to the recent war, and to me, sitting behind the wheel of my car, understanding in real time, through a Clubhouse room I was listening to, that it had begun. That within four minutes, war and explosions and anxiety and fear and worry and that wretched helplessness had all arrived at once.

Strikes and missiles and aircraft and bombs and bad news in the nights were happening in Iran. And for us on this side of the world, the difference between night and morning had lost all meaning. It had all become one.

I had no sleep. But honestly, I had no wakefulness either. The relentless anxiety would not allow it.

News, and news, and analysis of the news, and news again.

Only after two or three days did I remember people. Their feelings. Their emotions. Their state. Their experiences.

Terrible.

The situation was more terrible still.

Everyone in a terrible state.

As if in those two or three days the rest of the world had gone quiet and no one except us cared. As if silence had spread everywhere except Iran and the countries around it.

What was strange was that there seemed to be no sound around me either.

I was living inside a silence.

When I walked, there was no sound. In the car, no sound. At work, at practice, with all that noise of balls and commotion and screaming and shouting, no sound. Even when I ate, there was no sound of chewing. It was as if, even in conversation, only the receptors tuned to the speaker were connected, and nothing else.

The world had no sound.

Anxiety without limit, but mute.

Like your painting.

Well, to be honest, there was sound. But the sound of thought and worry kept cutting everything else off. The sound of anxiety was winning, always.

Another thing that was disturbing the sound design of the scene was this: everything was happening in Iran, and I was not in Iran.

I was following the news and the events, but from a distance.

In real time, I was hearing that people were living under attack and fear and sleepless nights, but I was not there. So the image-making was running at full power and force. I kept feeding it, and it had no time to chew or swallow.

And so in my outer world there was silence, and only and only and only image.

Like people who are deaf. You know how they say that people who cannot hear have the rest of their senses running on turbocharge? Image had become that for me. As if everything were too much and too fast and overwhelming and excessive.

In those same days I built an image for myself from a piece of news I heard, and it destroyed me.

I only heard it described, and I built it.

It was bad. Very.

Hard and brutal. Very.

I think it was with that description and the imagining that followed it, the first time I experienced something like a panic attack, for a few seconds.

I was listening live to a report, a first-hand account of events, audio on Clubhouse, from a number of people. It was a bad night in Iran. The worst, apparently, up to that point. People were talking about the sounds, about the neighborhoods under attack.

At one moment, the narrator who had been telling the story with fear and urgency suddenly went silent and asked for time.

First, surprise from the listeners.

Then waiting.

Gradually, worry.

And then fear.

All of us, myself included, us listeners, and the other local narrators as well, we all thought the person had gone under a missile or a bomb. Gone.

Those poor souls were now waiting, thinking that perhaps they and their families would be next, that they too would go under the next missiles and bombs. And people like me were worried about the people we love who were living inside all of that.

Everyone silent.

For me, listening from the other end of the world, silence lay over the silences of the days before.

I pulled over.

Helpless. Frightened. Anxious.

The speed of the mind and the image-making were unbearable.

I was staring at the steering wheel. As if I were ashamed to lift my head.

I was afraid.

The narrator's voice came back.

With fear and anxiety. It was clear in the voice, plain as day, but the person was trying not to let it show. A remarkable spirit.

They started with a laugh and a daze. With an oh-oh, half joking, they said:

"We were almost gone."

I started driving again.

They went on: the attack had been so heavy they had been forced to go under the stairs so the rubble would not fall on them. They said:

"I just went under the stairs, put my hands over my ears, mouth open in disbelief, wondering why on earth this thing would not stop."

Hands over the ears, mouth open.

Just like your painting, The Scream.

Mute and anxious and bewildered.

In all of that, the hardest thing in the world seemed to me to be patience and endurance. My window of tolerance was at its smallest possible size.

And as it happened, I needed twice the patience and twice the endurance.

The next morning a five-day basketball camp was beginning, and I had promised to go and help.

A crowded camp. Full of kids of every height and age. Noisy.

Most of them, as it turned out, were very good at screaming, unlike me.

A strange crowd, in short.

But silent.

The children were spending their holidays. Passing the hot summer holidays. Hopeful parents had sent their kids so they would have something to do in the heat, maybe even pick up a sport or a skill. The kids would have a few hours of fun; the parents would have a moment to breathe.

But in that crowd, one child did not belong there.

None of those reasons applied to him.

He did not want to be there at all.

He had no interest, and it took an army of people to manage him and keep an eye on him. The coaches took turns, one after another, trying to have a word with him. Come on, come play with the ball a little, have some fun, make some friends, enjoy your time.

Everyone tried to win him over in their own way.

But the child was not to be won over.

He did not make friends with any of the other kids, nor with the ball, nor with any of the coaches. He sat the whole time with his knees drawn up to his chest, silent.

Play and practice and jumping and joy and fun, none of it.

In that state, me with no nerves and no patience and wrapped in silence, this child was a presence off to the side of the frame. Another source of torment and trouble.

Usually in situations like this I go over to a child with full patience and talk them down off the ledge. But this was not the right time.

The war and the fear and the worry, twenty thousand kilometers away, would not allow it.

To the point where I gave up and decided simply to endure.

In my silence, inside and out, one sound kept disrupting the conditions at irregular intervals, kept shattering things, kept making my nerves a hundred degrees worse:

The buzzer on the scoreboard in the gym, going off at the end of each game and each drill.

Oh, what a loud and brutal sound, Edvard.

It tore through everything.

Loud and terrible and ear-splitting, tearing and jarring all at once.

It always jars. It is supposed to, so everyone can hear it.

But in those days it was more terrible than ever.

By the second or third day, the child in the story had begun to take part. I do not remember which day it was, but it was an important achievement.

All the children engaged in playing, learning, and activities.

A victory for everyone.

It was the middle of the day when he decided to sit out before a game ended and rest a little. No one could insist. The fact that he had started participating at all was enough.

So he sat in a corner, and no one bothered him.

He was not bothering anyone either. He was eating a biscuit.

Tired and catching his breath and pleased with his biscuit, free from the surroundings and the world and the coaches and the other players and the rules, and most importantly, free and unaware of the buzzer.

Not ten seconds had passed in that carefree little happiness of his when the ear-splitting buzzer went off.

The child was not expecting it.

His world exploded.

The child's calm shattered, the same way that strange inner-outer silence of those few days of mine had been torn apart.

The buzzer in that fine gym, in the cool of the air conditioning, hit the child precisely in the place in his nerves that he had not even known existed.

In the middle of all of it, I happened to have my eyes on the recently-active child, who was suffering through two or three seconds of the buzzer's sound.

I should have said earlier: to be fair, the buzzer and its sound really are ear-splitting and unpleasant.

A loud sound.

But at the same moment, the child's reaction brought back the silence of those few days for me, returned it all.

The child, frightened, mouth open, both hands over his ears, pressed into the corner of a wall, in distress.

Exactly like your painting, The Scream, Edvard.

Exactly like the Clubhouse narrator under the bombs and missiles a few days before.

I had not seen the narrator or the narrator's reaction, but I was seeing the child's reaction right in front of me.

Believe me, they were the same.

With only a small difference.

One had been frightened by the sound of a buzzer in a cool gym, and the other by a life under threat, a family under threat, loved ones under threat.

Both waiting for the incident to end.

One had an army of people go after him, telling him nothing had happened, come and play.

The other came back on their own, laughing, and continued the report.

One was four years old.

One was forty.

One was in a country being bombed.

One was in a country doing the bombing.

And in the middle of all this, me.

From a country being bombed, coaching in a country doing the bombing, building images and redrawing your painting, The Scream.

All three images the same.

Anxious.

Waiting.

Bewildered.

Mute.

But in all of them, a little while later, there was a movement, a stirring, a continuation that for a moment broke the famous silence of those few days and brought with it excitement and relief and a sense of peace.

A narrator who was alive and who continued the story with joy.

And a child who took his hands from his ears and ran off to play with his new friends with excitement.

Now I too am waiting, and I am hopeful.

That the stirring and the temporary sound that is slowly growing longer will one day become permanent.